The present invention relates to an improved embossing machine and method. More particularly, the invention pertains to an improved credit card embossing machine which is relatively lightweight, compact in construction, and quiet in operation due to the simplification of mechanisms used to power several operating assemblies in the machine. The method of the present invention provides an embossing operation which minimizes area, eliminates unnecessary mechanisms and improves operating characteristics of the machine.
Credit card embossing machines are well known. However, they all share one or more disadvantages which result in greater weight and/or space, complicated mechanisms which produce excessive noise, slow speeds, complicated processing, low responsiveness or high energy consumption. Some of these disadvantages also result in higher machine costs or in unnecessary maintenance of the embossing machine as a result of repeated operations using numerous mechanisms.
Efforts have been made on a continuing basis to increase the speed and reliability of these machines from the early fully mechanical devices of the types shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,115,456; 2,463,690; and 2,973,853, while reducing their complexity and energy consumption. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,638,563 represents an effort to eliminate the cost and complexity of machines which had theretofore positioned a plurality of male and female embossing wheels simultaneously with their selected characters after which embossing dies were closed upon the plastic cards. This created positioning and alignment problems, the solution of which involved using a plurality of male character embossing punches whose actuation was computer controlled to move short strokes against corresponding female embossing character dies.
Conventional embossers also have not taken into account the saving of material. For instance, in a topper operation in which foil is caused by heat to be adhered to the raised embossed characters on a credit card, the topper foil was advanced in a fixed manner, regardless of the number of rows of characters to be topped. This resulted in unnecessary wasting of foil material when credit cards having a lesser number of rows or a smaller spacing between rows of characters were being processed on a continuous basis.
Although credit card blanks which are to be embossed usually have very tight tolerances, we have found nevertheless that there are some tolerance variations from card to card. However, conventional machines could not adequately and simply accommodate these tolerance variations in positioning these cards in the machine from a supply hopper to avoid the need for accurate adjustment of the moving parts so that the card could be accurately embossed in the desired areas. As a result, constant fine adjustment was required.
Most of the automated embossing machines known are particularly suited for high volume production of cards because they are relatively expensive and of substantial size. Consequently, they are not particularly useful for low volume producers due to the cost and size constraints. The high volume embossing machines employed linear arrays of embossing elements, with one embossing module being assigned a task of embossing characters on a single corresponding embossing line of a card. This arrangement while satisfactory for high speed production requires larger real estate for the machine.